Connect the Dots

Connect the Dots

Not far from where I grew up, there's a little town named, Poca. Their football team was the Dots. Get it? The Poca... Dots. Go Dots.

As sports teams go, it's not as fierce as say, Raptors or Bulldogs or even Demon Deacons. Fierce? No. But what's more important than teaching kids to connect the dots?

In this always-on, Internet age, where people can Google or Wikipedia everything, we don't need to memorize names and dates and geography. Does this make us dumber? Or does it give us the chance to be creative in the truest sense?

Says education specialist Tony Wagner, "Today, because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge." (Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.)

In other words, your job is not to dream up new dots; it's to connect the ones you already have. This is the new economy. But the idea isn't 21st century new. Even Jesus did it.

Jesus connected dots. In terms of content, there's practically nothing new in the "New" Testament. Most of what Jesus said had been said before in the "Old" Testament. Caring for the poor? Done. Good news to the outcasts? Heard it. Love God and neighbor? Got it. Instead, Jesus did the truly radical: he connected the dots of book knowledge to the dots of real life people. He took memorized, guarded information and pushed it into flesh-and-blood reality. You could say he was born to be the connection. Jesus connected the dots.

Don't waste your energy fiercely protecting your faith; liberate it. Share it.

Be like Jesus: Connect the dots.